In Her Day (19 page)

“All right, Twanger, get your fat ass out from under the desk,” Ilse barked.

The white walls covered with push pins, copy, and fingerprints seemed to shudder as much as New York’s fearless boy reporter.

“What are you going to do,” whined a high-pitched voice.

“Cut your balls off, what do you think,” Alice Reardon snarled.

“You’re sick,” Martin managed.

“Right—of you, you hothouse phony. Now get your ass out from beneath that desk.” Ilse landed a furious kick smack on his can.

“I’ll sue, I’ll sue.” The voice was climbing into the soprano register.

“What makes you think you’ll live that long?” Ilse laughed.

According to their scouting, the
Village Rag
emptied out Thursday at four. People were exhausted by copy deadlines, layouts squeaking in just on time, and the usual chaos of that weekly red-letter day when the
Rag
made it to press or else. Martin Twanger usually stayed on and the women counted on his solitary vigil with a blue pencil behind his ear for effect.

What they didn’t count on was a noise behind a closed door which opened narrowly then tried to close again. Harriet, along for the fun, grabbed it and pulled it open. Hanging on the door knob was none other than Olive Holloway and a middle-aged man smoking a pipe.

“Join the party.” Ilse motioned them to come in.

“Olive, what an unexpected displeasure,” Alice crooned.

Olive, looking stricken, slunk out, followed by the puffing pipe. As Harriet closed the door she noticed an Emmy standing conspicuously on a cluttered desk. So that’s who it is, she thought, Joshua Chernakov, who did the script for that television special on instant nostalgia: “Where is the Left?” So much for political journalism.

As color returned to Olive’s face, her tongue warmed up as well. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Flushing out a rat,” Harriet answered.

“Now see here, young women, I don’t know what all this is about but can’t you act a little more discreetly? You aren’t going to really beat up Martin, are you?” Joshua spoke.

“Not with my hands, I don’t want to get them dirty.” Ilse glared at the pipe.

Still squeezed under his desk, Martin babbled something inaudible.

“Martin, come out from under there,” Joshua commanded.

“And let these harpies tear me limb from limb? Fat chance.”

“Don’t come out, Martin. I know these women. They’re capable of anything,” Olive warned.

“Really, Olive, this is ridiculous.” Joshua’s voice lowered to give him a more commanding tone.

“Why don’t you both shut up and sit down,” Ilse ordered.

“Young lady, I don’t take orders from the United States government, I won’t take them from you. I was on Nixon’s shit list, you know.”

Ilse walked over and cracked him in the chest. Joshua Chernakov sat down with new respect in his eyes. “Well, now you’re on my shit list, mister.”

“See, see, I told you they’re violent,” Martin moaned, the desk giving his words a mystical reverberation.

“Get out from under there, Twanger,” Alice softly called to him.

“I won’t, I won’t. You can’t make me.”

“Wanna bet?” Alice grabbed one chubby leg. Martin’s white socks flashed like a surrender signal. “Christ, this pig really is a pig. Give me a hand.”

Harriet grabbed the other, equally chubby leg, and they pulled mightily.

Martin held onto the desk legs, tears streaming down his cheeks. At this point he bordered on hysteria and said something garbled but that sounded like, “I’m too young to die, I’m too young to die.”

Ilse, tiring of the intrepid reporter’s melodrama, brought her booted foot down on his left hand with a swift crunch. As he let go, Alice and Harriet pulled as hard as they could and out he came collecting most of the floor’s filth as he slid.

“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,” Martin wailed.

Neither Joshua nor Olive made a move to help the stricken man, either out of cowardice or scarcely concealed loathing for a creature both had come to depend on.

“Now sit down and shut up.” Alice threw him in a seat.

“We’re all going to sit here and have a polite conversation. Since Mr. Twanger needs some time to collect himself, let’s start with you, Olive. You here to pick up a payoff for that rotten story you helped write about our group?”

“I don’t have to answer to you.”

“I’d advise it.” Ilse’s anger, cool, was frightening but Olive perhaps thought her female hormones would save her and missed Ilse’s purpose entirely.

“Don’t try to push me around, little Lenin. I’ll get a lawyer as soon as I get out of here.”

“You do that.” Ilse backhanded her with such force Joshua’s left eye began to twitch uncontrollably. “Now what are you doing here?”

With tears in her eyes, Olive whispered in a small voice, “Joshua and I were working out arrangements for me to do a monthly column on the women’s movement.”

“Getting smart aren’t you, Olive?” Alice stared at her. “You’ve learned not to take things in money but in kind. I’m real impressed. How about you, Harriet?”

“Yeah, I’m real impressed.” Harriet moved to get closer to Alice and she reached for Joshua’s arm. Disgusted he picked her hand off his sleeve as though she were a cockroach.

“You too good for her now, Mr. Big?” Ilse sneered at him.

“I don’t have anything to do with your movement battles.”

“That’s not quite true,” Alice stated.

As he was not the center of attention, Martin Twanger made for the door. With two graceful strides Ilse was behind him and darted her right foot around his ankle. Down he went.

“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.”

“Shut up, creep.”

As if walking on eggshells he made his way back to his chair.

“Martin, move over here so you can be next to your colleagues.” Alice pulled up a chair next to Olive so she could enjoy his overpowering aroma.

“So you’re above all this, Mr. Chernakov?”

“I didn’t say that. I simply said I have nothing to do with your movement battles. You’re angry at Olive for cooperating with Martin on that unfortunate article. That has nothing to do with me, really.”

“Unfortunate! That was one of my best pieces,” Twanger wailed.

Joshua’s left eye twitched again.

“Well, Mr. Chernakov, I don’t see it your way at all.” Ilse started in on him. “You’ve made a career sucking off the male left, the Black movement, and now you’re going to draw some blood from us. You just sit back in your chair while other people take all
the risks and then you pass judgment on it. Yeah, I’ve been checking up on you. My favorite part is that then you go to cocktail parties and parade as a genuine intellectual member of the radical left. Bet the women in Valentino clothing dig it.”

Chernakov sputtered, his face blotched, but Ilse, unable or unwilling to check her contempt, chopped him square in the throat and he gasped, eyes bulging. “That’s a small payment for everyone you’ve ripped off. I wish to hell I could kill you and get away with it.”

Alice put her arm through Ilse’s left elbow and pulled her back gently. “Easy, Ilse, we’ve got work to do here.”

Alice took over. “I do have to hand it to you, Chernakov, you get a flunky like Twanger to write the smear story, you hire so-called reporters to cover each of the movements, preferably everything negative they can lay their hands on, then you write the big picture piece on what’s really wrong with America and the movements and your prose just sings, doesn’t it? Must be quite a strain putting out an essay every two weeks. But you must get quite a nice salary for it, don’t you? Just to show your heart’s in the right place, wouldn’t you like to contribute two thousand dollars to the rape crisis center? You could get your name on the patron’s list. That’d look real good to the cocktail crowd now, wouldn’t it? Show the world what a big guy you are, Joshua, you’re going to take women’s issues seriously, especially this issue.”

Joshua’s eye twitched wildly. Sweat poured over his forehead. He was a man afraid but he was afraid of something more than physical violence. “Yes, yes, I’ll do that.” What was left of his voice after Ilse’s chop cracked over every word.

“Just to make sure you won’t have a change of heart, we’ll check the center next Thursday to see if they’ve received your generous gift,” Ilse added.

He nodded his head painfully. Chernakov’s eyes never met theirs. He seemed to have found oneness with the floor.

Twanger yelped in disbelief, “Josh, what’s wrong with you? So what if they beat us up, we’ll take them to court.”

Head down, Chernakov said, slowly but distinctly, “No, I think there’s already been enough damage. Maybe they’re right. I haven’t taken any risks.”

“Come on!” Twanger exploded. “What do you care what they think? You run the
Rag
, man. You can blow them out of the water. I mean this is America. We’re the free press.”

“This is America all right and no one is free from your kind of freedom of the press.” Ilse looked at him.

Realizing he overstepped his bounds on two counts, Twanger shrank back in his chair, thoroughly dumbfounded. He was confused which frightened him more than ever.

“I get paid a lot less than Josh, you know. You’re not going to hit me up for money, are you?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Martin Twanger. I think you could make a small contribution to the women’s press collective.”

His face shriveled. “How much?”

“We’ll let you off the hook for five hundred dollars.” Alice nailed it home.

“Five hundred dollars?”

“Be a sport, Twanger, you spend that on grass.”

“Yeah, well so does everyone else in this city.”

“Did I say anything moral about it? But how would you feel if your contact went public, assuming someone
muscled him and he had to, you know? New York has some strange drug laws these days and that poor guy could get salted away for years. I bet he’d be real mad at you, Martin.”

“Christ, you all are like the Mafia.”

“Not quite, Martin, not quite. They’ve got money and political power. Right now we’re a little short on both counts but we’re learning, we’re really learning,” Harriet joined in.

“Now about your contribution? Would you like to make it in your name or remain anonymous?” Ilse pressed.

“Uh, anonymous.”

“One other little thing you need to do for us, Martin. You’ll print a retraction of last week’s slam on all counts particularly about my rich ‘keeper,’ ” Ilse quietly requested.

Twanger’s face went beet red. This hurt more than the money. Glancing at Joshua who now had his head in his hands, he thought the better of protest. “All right.”

Olive, last on the list, peered apprehensively at her foes. Harriet continued on the track, “Olive, since you can’t write and since you won’t have access to the women’s movement in the future it doesn’t make much sense for you to put out a column, does it?”

“I’ll do as I please, you haven’t got anything on me.”

Ilse started for her but Alice restrained her.

Harriet faced her down and with something approaching kindness in her voice said, “Olive, no one is going to talk to you and I doubt if Mr. Chernakov can afford to print your inner thoughts on a monthly basis.”

“What do you mean, no one is going to talk to me?”

“Just that,” Harriet countered.

“You don’t run this movement, you can’t muzzle it.”

Ilse, fed up, spat at her. “It’s people like you with the help of the Twangers and Chernakovs of the world that set us against one another. No one is going to talk to you, Olive. Word’s out. No responsible, street-organizing feminist will give you any information or let you in her group. Sure you can talk to the other crazies like yourself but that’s not news unless you want to print it in
Psychology Today
.”

“You’ll pay for this, Ilse—you, all of you, will pay.”

“What are you going to do? Write a long piece showing how I was trained to be a C.I.A. agent while in junior high school? That’s about your speed.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Good, Olive. You just run up the flag and see who salutes. That will save us all a lot of time in this movement discovering who’s nuts and who isn’t.” Alice sighed, completely disgusted. “I think it’s time we leave these people to their just desserts—after all it is suppertime.”

“Right,” Harriet replied.

As the women left the office, Olive flew off her chair and made for the telephone. Twanger and Chernakov looked dazed.

“You two hungry?” Harriet asked.

“Why don’t we go over to Mother Courage? Since word will get out fast we ought to be where people can find us, calm, you know?” Alice thought out loud.

“Oh, Alice, it’s my night off. I’m there all the time.”

“Discipline, Ilse. Come on, we’ll buy you a pizza and you can eat it in the corner in shame and pray Dolores doesn’t sniff it out. We really ought to be on solid territory and public.”

“You’re right, Alice. You’re always right,” Ilse laughed.

“You are something when you are pissed. I thought you’d kill all three of them.” Harriet laughed as much out of tension as anything else.

Her anger drained her and Ilse felt nothing but exhaustion right then. “H-m-m, well, I’d have killed them if I could.”

“Better not say that publicly in case any of them ever winds up dead, m’dear,” cautioned Alice.

“Didn’t Twanger and Olive make a pair though. Those two just go together,” Harriet smirked.

“Yeah, like gin and seconal.”

“Alice, you have a sharp tongue in your head. I never would have known.”

“Well, usually I think it, I don’t say it. Now Carole, she says it, that’s why I like her.”

Ilse winced.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. What an asshole I was. I think half my fury back there at the
Village Rag
was over Carole and everything. The whole damned world!”

“Maybe you’ll get back together.” Harriet tried to be helpful.

“Naw, I doubt it. In ten years maybe.”

“Wonder where we’ll all be in ten years?” Alice asked.

“Funny, I don’t have much personal sense of that. I’ve got ideas of where I want feminism to be in ten years, but I’m not so clear on me,” Ilse replied.